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Jean-Michel André Jarre[note 1] (French: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl ɑ̃dʁe ʒaʁ]; born 24 August 1948) is a French composer, performer and record producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and new-age genres, and is known for organising outdoor spectacles featuring his music, accompanied by vast laser displays, large projections and fireworks.

Jarre was raised in Lyon by his mother and grandparents and trained on the piano. From an early age, he was introduced to a variety of art forms, including street performers, jazz musicians and the artist Pierre Soulages. But his musical style was perhaps most heavily influenced by Pierre Schaeffer, a pioneer of musique concrète at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

His first mainstream success was the 1976 album Oxygène. Recorded in a makeshift studio at his home, the album sold an estimated 18 million copies. Oxygène was followed in 1978 by Équinoxe, and in 1979, Jarre performed to a record-breaking audience of more than a million people at the Place de la Concorde, a record he has since broken three times. More albums were to follow, but his 1979 concert served as a blueprint for his future performances around the world. Several of his albums have been released to coincide with large-scale outdoor events.

As of 2004, Jarre had sold an estimated 80 million albums and singles.[1] He was the first Western musician officially invited to perform in the People's Republic of China and holds the world record for the largest-ever audience at an outdoor event for his Moscow concert on 6 September 1997, which was attended by 3.5 million people.

Biography

Early life, influences, and education

Jean-Michel Jarre was born in Lyon on 24 August 1948, to Francette Pejot, a French Resistance member and concentration camp survivor, and composer Maurice Jarre.[2][3] His grandmother was Jewish.[4] When Jarre was five, his parents separated and his father moved to the United States, leaving him with his mother.[5] He did not see his father again until reaching the age of 18.[3] For the first eight years of his life, Jarre spent six months each year at his maternal grandparents' flat on the Cours de Verdun, in the Perrache district of Lyon. Jarre's grandfather was an oboe player, engineer and inventor, designing an early audio mixer used at Radio Lyon. He also gave Jean-Michel his first tape recorder.[6] From his vantage point high above the pavement, the young Jarre was able to observe street performers at work, an experience he later cited as proving influential on his art.

Jarre struggled with classical piano studies, although he later changed teachers and worked on his scales.[8] A more general interest in musical instruments was sparked by his discovery at the Saint-Ouen flea market, where his mother sold antiques, of a Boris Vian trumpet violin. He often accompanied his mother to Le Chat Qui Pêche (The Fishing Cat), a Paris jazz club run by one of her friends from her resistance years, where saxophonists Archie Shepp and John Coltrane, and trumpet players Don Cherry and Chet Baker were regular performers. These early jazz experiences suggested to him that music may be "descriptive, without lyrics".[3][9] He was also influenced by the work of French artist Pierre Soulages, whose exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris he attended. Soulages' paintings used multiple textured layers, and Jarre realised that "for the first time in music, you could act as a painter with frequencies and sounds."[3] He was also influenced by classical, modernist music; in a 2004 interview for The Guardian, he spoke of the effect that a performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring had upon him:

This is where Stravinsky created it in 1913, and it was a huge shock. I also saw the last concert by the great Arabic singer Om Khalsoum. She is the goddess, the Maria Callas of the Orient. Then I heard "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, and I realised that music can talk to your tummy. I was so impressed by the organic sensuality coming from Ray Charles's music – there was no intellectual process and it was great.

As a young man Jarre earned money by selling his paintings, exhibiting some of his works at the Lyon Gallery – L'Œil écoute, and by playing in a band called Mystère IV. While he studied at the Lycée Michelet, his mother arranged for him to take lessons in harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Jeannine Rueff of the Conservatoire de Paris.[8][9] In 1967 he played guitar in a band called The Dustbins, who appear in the film Des garçons et des filles [fr]. He mixed instruments including the electric guitar and the flute with tape effects and other sounds.[3] More experimentation was followed in 1968, when he began to use tape loops, radios and other electronic devices, in 1969 he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM),[8] founded and led by Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of musique concrete.[11] Jarre was introduced to the Moog modular synthesizer and spent time working at the studio of influential German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne.

In the kitchen of his apartment in Rue de la Trémoille, Jarre set up a small makeshift recording studio.[13][14] It included his first synthesiser, an EMS VCS 3,[15] and an EMS Synthi AKS, each linked to Revox tape machines. For a 1969 exposition at the Maison de la Culture (Cultural House) in Reims, Jarre wrote the five-minute song "Happiness Is a Sad Song". That same year he composed and recorded "La Cage/Erosmachine", a mixture of harmony, tape effects and synthesisers,[16] which was released in 1971.

Jarre was married to Flore Guillard from 1975 until 1977.[135] He met his second wife, actress Charlotte Rampling, at a dinner party in St Tropez in 1976.[136] The two married, and Jarre gained custody of his daughter Émilie Charlotte,[136] and Rampling did the same with her son Barnaby, also Jarre and Rampling had David as a son.[137] Jarre and Rampling separated in 1996[138][139] and divorced in 2002.[140] He had a brief relationship with Isabelle Adjani,[141] and married French actress Anne Parillaud in May 2005.[142] In November 2010 the couple announced their divorce.[143] Jarre has a half-sister, Stéphanie Jarre, from one of Maurice Jarre's other marriages.[144] His stepbrother, Kevin Jarre, died in 2011.[145] Although Maurice and Jean-Michel remained estranged, following Maurice's death in 2009, Jarre paid tribute to his legacy.

Jarre said about his father: "My father and I never really achieved a real relationship. We probably saw each other 20 or 25 times in our lifetime. When you are able, at my age, to count the times you have seen your father, it says something... I think it's better to have conflict, or, if you have a parent who dies, you grieve, but the feeling of absence is very difficult to fill, and it took me a while to absorb that.

Courtesy – Wikipedia

- Jean-Michel Jarre French Composer

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